Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-82

The published work of Claude Levi-Strauss over the last three and a half decades has established him as one of the world's most innovative anthropologists. Yet throughout this period he was maintaining a full taching commitment in Paris. The pieces in Anthropology and Myth illustrate (in his own words) 'the efforts, the tentative advances and retreats and now and again the achievements of a thought process during some thirty-two years that amount to a large propotion of an individual life and the span of a generation'. Levi-Strauss used to the lecture theatre as a workshop in which to try out and develop new ideas, and many of the familiar themes of his books will be found here: analysis of myth and ritual, totemism, kinship, marriage and social structure. Offering a unique glimpse of the genesis of such subjects throughout his teaching career, this book provides a sketchbook of the themes painted elsewhere in larger, more finished form, and thus forms a document of vital importance for the history of anthropological thought.